Nvidia showcases Tegra in-car with the BMW i3

At CES, Nvidia showed off the breadth of its ambitions by showcasing the 192 core Tegra K1, and not just for next-gen gaming, but in-car, in an electric BMW i3.

If you are still at CES 2014, you can pop by the Nvidia booth and collect a tee shirt or a temporary tattoo, as well as feasting your eyes on demos of the Tegra K1. The Tegra K1 is Nvidia's 192 graphics core chip built on the Kepler architecture. At the booth the company is showing a demo of Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 gaming engine running on the Tegra K1, showing its comparative power compared to the desktop performance of its high end GPUs.

There is also a partner demo by Origin using its Genesis PC with four GeForce GTX Titan GPUs connected to thee 65-inch 4K Panasonic displays. That's $30,000 of sublime computing graphics hardware, pumping out 1.5 billion pixels a second.

And then, there's the BMW i3 parked in prime position in the booth. Here, Nvidia wants to demonstrate the Tegra K1 Visual Computing Module, which it is using to build a new generation of fully configurable digital dashboards. Processing power is also being used to showcase a new advanced driver assistance system technology, demonstrating thins like crash avoidance and lane-departure detection.

Check out the demo of the BMW i3 in this video:

The Germans seem to have a particular love of Nvidia because, Audi was touting its partnership with Nvidia, incorporating the Tegra 3 in a 12.3 inch in-car infotainment system and, something I am very excited about, a detachable tablet solution that would integrate with the cars audio and video systems, as well as acting as a standalone Android tablet. All this, and 4G LTE from AT&T to round out the experience.